Consumer demand drives continuing innovation of storage devices of decreasing size and increased storage capacity. In the case of disc-based storage mediums, the term areal density capability (ADC) may refer to a product of a number of data tracks on a disk (e.g., tracks per inch (TPI)) and a number of data bits along each data track (e.g., bits per inch (BPI)). The tracks per inch value is sometimes referred to as “radial density,” while the bits per inch value may be referred to as the “recording density,” “bit density,” or “linear density.” As TPI and BPI values increase, read heads have greater difficulty accurately reading data from the data tracks, resulting in a higher bit error rate (BER). If the BER becomes too high, storage device performance may suffer as error correction and read retry operations are performed. Therefore, some data storage devices are configured with preset TPI and BPI values selected to achieve a high ADC while maintaining an acceptable BER. A number of challenges are associated with increasing drive TPI and BPI beyond current limits.